Abstract
Calvino’s city of Leonia is a continuous city, produced anew each day. Waste generated by this everyday production—and its removal—comes to define the city itself, materially and geographically. This “fortress of indestructible leftovers” is continually pushed outward and piled higher, fusing into new landscapes (Calvino 1974, 115). Teetering piles of pianos, porcelain, and boilers—normally heavy and permanent items—threaten collapse at the edges of the crater surrounding the city. With each new delivery of discarded items, from empty toothpaste tubes to encyclopedias, the waste looms ever higher, not only over the city’s geographic bounds, but also over its possible futures. In this chapter, I draw on Leonia as an analytic to consider contemporary Glasgow’s architectures of inhabitation, and what these make possible, from deindustrialization to green infrastructure.
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Notes
- 1.
Much existing housing stock in the iconic forms of tenement flats was built before 1915 from Scottish sandstone and financed through global trade in goods such as tobacco, cotton, steam engine technology, and steel. Such financing was rooted firmly in the Atlantic trade and enslavement of people—a critical piece in considering the history of Empire in Glasgow. For detailed discussion, see Mullen (2022).
- 2.
The president of a housing association in Easterhouse and a long-time resident of the area, a woman in her 60s, explained that even despite her own commitment to engaging in planning discussions for new housing projects, “You never think about what’s underground, when you see the plans. You only think about what it looks like, the finishes, not how it works. And how it works is how you live with it, after its built. Like, is your garden flooding? What’s actually underground?”
- 3.
For more detailed discussion about our methods, findings, and future directions for SUDS and green infrastructure development in Glasgow, see Donald (2018).
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Lang, U. (2022). “Submerging the City in Its Own Past”: Tracing Glasgow’s Architectures of Inhabitation. In: Linder, B. (eds) "Invisible Cities" and the Urban Imagination. Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_13
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